Mathematical Geometry in Food

Food in the shape of triangles is both fashionable and delicious. Triangles provide visual interest to your cuisine and make it ideal for Instagram stories. Samosas, nachos, pizza, triangular sandwiches, waffles and Toblerone are just a few examples. It goes on and on. Here, we'll look at some of the most beautiful and fascinating uses of mathematical geometry in food!

1. Pringles: Pringles are nothing but a hyperbolic paraboloid (saddle-shaped). Apart from the fact that a Pringle naturally fits between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, why is the chip's hyperbolic paraboloid geometry so special?

a) The saddle design made it easy to stack chips. This is why, even with all of the other Pringles stacked on top of it, the bottom-most Pringle does not crack. This reduced the chances of chips breaking during shipping.

b) Because it's a saddle, there's no way to forecast how it'll break up. This heightens the crunchiness and, as a result, the strange satisfaction.

c) When compared to other shapes, the press block is relatively easier to make.

2. Romanesco Broccoli: The symmetry of Romanesco broccoli is lovely. It has a fractal-y appearance. Mathematicians study fractals, which are shapes that recur on smaller and smaller scales. We can't declare that romanesco broccoli is a real fractal because nothing on Earth is.

3. Fortune cookies: Fortune cookies are unique and quite interesting. It's a bit like making a Pringle, where you start with a disc then bend it in two ways. Although they are topologically a disc, the shape of a fortune cookie lacks a geometrical name.

4. Donuts: Surprisingly, a donut and a cup have the same topological shape! The shape of a donut in itself is a torus.

5. Egg: An egg is intriguing because it resembles an ellipsoid, albeit it isn't quite one.

-Dikshita Bhatnagar